With the abundance of multimedia content made available through various means in general and the Internet in particular, there is also a need to provide effective ways for searching, processing and analyzing multimedia content items. However, such a task may be challenging due the complexity of the content and the volumes of pictures, video clips, images and graphics currently available.
A multimedia content item, e.g., a picture, is a composition of many details (multimedia elements). In some cases, the multimedia elements can be of help in identifying the content or the context of the picture, but in most cases the multimedia elements provide no information that can help in identifying the content or other multimedia elements within the multimedia content item.
For example, a picture containing a multimedia element (e.g., of a Mickey Mouse hat) provides a good indication that the picture (multimedia content item) can be identified as being related to “Mickey Mouse”. But such a picture may also include less well known multimedia elements. Such multimedia elements may be less effective and more complicated to handle because they are not necessarily associated with the known figure, e.g., “Mickey Mouse”, or the information about them is limited. As another example, multimedia elements within an old video clip (multimedia content item) posted on YouTube® showing a cowboy hat, a horse, a saddle, etc. may be relatively easy to analyze, but identifying who is the man wearing the cowboy hat and riding the horse may be a complex task, especially, when there are no common references to that man, for example, in social networks.
In the prior art there are different techniques for analyzing well known multimedia elements. For example, when analyzing the name Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Elizabeth Winslet embedded in a post, the post may be identified as related to the movie “Titanic”. A problem may arise when unknown, or unrecognizable multimedia elements should be identified or associated with common references that may be further analyzed.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide a solution for analyzing and identifying unknown multimedia elements within the multimedia content item.